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Empty bellies and empty elections

Published Nov 19, 2005 11:11 AM

The desperate situation of the people of imperialist-occupied Haiti has grown worse. Hunger and random brutality, according to a report produced by the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights and the Latin American office of UNICEF, are the daily fare of children and teenagers in Haiti.

Of course, UNICEF didn’t put its conclusions so bluntly. It merely reported that, in 15 percent of the zones included in its nationwide survey, children were killed by gunfire. In one-third of the zones children were either injured by gunfire or beaten. In urban areas, where violence is most common, rapes of children have increased markedly.

Fewer and fewer children are going to school in this country where the illiteracy rate is more than 50 percent because schools and the streets leading to them are too dangerous. In about 70 percent of the zones UNICEF surveyed, families had fled to safer areas.

Much of the burden of the current situation in Haiti is falling on its children. Hunger affects them more severely since they are still growing and they are less capable of resisting violence. But their parents and other adults have also suffered. An estimated 10,000 people throughout Haiti have been killed by violence since the U.S.-backed coup began in early 2004 and more than 3,000 supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide are currently political prisoners.

UNICEF is pleading for compassion and mercy and aid from the very countries that created, deepened and intensified the misery of Haiti: the United States, Canada and France, with the assistance of Brazil.

The U.S. government, with some technical and political cooperation from France, organized and implemented the coup that removed from office Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s democratically elected president. U.S. Marines from the ambassador’s bodyguard then put Aristide on a U.S. plane that took him to the Central African Republic.

When the U.S. and France had to pull back a bit from Haiti in order to fulfill more pressing commitments—the U.S. in Iraq, France in the Ivory Coast—Canada stepped up its role, spending at least $100 million to prop up the current, illegitimate government that Washington imposed on Haiti.

The current UN approach to “solving” Haiti’s problems is a “selection/election” of a president and parliament that will do what they are told and certainly not challenge the U.S.’s political control in the Caribbean and Latin America or demand reparations from France for imposing a crushing debt on Haiti. In 1825, France forced Haiti to pay French plantation owners 150 million gold francs in compensation for freed slave laborers. According to an estimate by the Aristide government, this would amount to $21 billion today. The Aristide government was actively seeking this amount as reparations when it was overthrown.

Currently the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) claims to have registered 3 million Haitians for the proposed elections, but only a handful of its fancy identification cards—which require thumb prints and photos—have been distributed. The CEP has been forced to postpone the first round of elections, which was scheduled for Nov. 17 but has been pushed back to Dec. 11 and Dec. 18, despite the fact that de facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue made a round of international visits at the end of October to the UN Security Council and various bodies in Europe swearing up and down that the next president of Haiti would take office as constitutionally mandated on Feb. 7, 2006.

The CEP has removed three candidates from the roster of 39 who are running for president because they have foreign passports, which under Haitian law means they are no longer citizens. The CEP assigned identification numbers to the 43 parties and political groups running in the elections. Some of the concerned parties registered loud protests, charging the draw was rigged because their numbers weren’t in the box.